Indeed, if we do experience a short "ice age" then many people will think globabl warming was a bunch of hogwash and say it is ok to pollute
A couple of years ago I did one of those phone polls some organization was running. The poll appeared to be structured in such a way as to run through a different set of questions based on how you answered earlier ones.
I got asked if I believed that humans were causing global warming. I said no.
The follow up questions all involved how little I cared about pollution, with possible answers that didn't approach how I felt about polution in general. The thinking was that if I didn't stay awake at night worrying about global warming that I was okay with existing, or even worse, levels of pollution.
You don't need to worry about global warming to be just as concerned with making air not fit for breathing, or water not fit for drinking. Hell, I've seen first hand what some cleaning up can do right here in Los Angeles. Having lived here my entire life, I remember just how bad the air was when I was a kid as opposed to what it's like today. I distinctly remember "smog alerts" and what the sky around here used to look like.
The world doesn't have to be coming to an end to have pollution way up there in the things to be concerned about category.
This article is simply scarist propaganda. While the underlying research may be valid (the salinity of the artic might be incresing) I think its a bit much to suddenly assume that this is caused by humans.
Although I find myself in agreement with much of what you had to say here, I believe this statement is a bit harsh. The author's call to action was not to drastically alter human behavior, or change how we make our vehicles move. He was calling attention to the issue of oceanic salinity, and the need to get many more measurement points so that we can understand just what in the heck is going on.
I've read enough of the enviromentalist wacko articles to know the difference. This guy doesn't strike me as yet another disaffected communist as is commonly spouting the end of the world is near. You'll find enough of those types posting on this thread as it is! A call to get more data sounds like someone who knows a bit more about the topic than some pamphlet reading zealot.
And what effect does dumping iron in the ocean have on that biosphere, and by extension, the climate? Killing off the Great Barrier Reef doesn't seem like the answer.
Your first bit is an outstanding question. The second is jumping WAY too fast to a conclusion. For a more detailed analysis of what all is being talked about here, please refer to the Wired article Dumping Ironby Charles Graeber.
More interestingly are the counter viewpoints to the approach be described in this article. First off, the folks who don't think this will do anything but burn dollars. The second group of those critical are concerned with the notion that we're not 100% certain that the globe is warming, or if it is, by how much.
What if we took corrective action to cool things off, only to find that it wasn't as bad as was thought. The cure would definitely be worse than the symptoms.
I do find myself in agreement with Dr. Gagosian's main point from the original article. We need a LOT more data, and a much more complete understanding of exactly what is going on before we seriouly consider corrective actions.
If you happen to be on some flavor of *nix, you might want to consider using Fluxbox as your window manager. It lets you connect windows for anything, in much the same way Photoshop does.
I start fourth year of a degree course in computer science in just over a week, and I'm scared of Telnet.
I cannot begin to tell you how pleased I am to hear this about my future competition in the job market. What kind of wine do your professors like? I feel like I owe them something!
From my experience in the *nix world, everything done GUI-ily can be done..not...gui-ly
That's what I was thinking, coming from FreeBSD, until I got a hard look at the back end of Suse's config files. This is not a slam on Suse!! They have darn good reasons for some of the complexity that goes into their configs as it relates to the quite popular Yast2 app. The thing is, that complexity becomes really clever to figure out when just looking at the end result of the fancier tools. Had similar problems with Mandrake as well. Not really experienced enough with RedHat to say.
Thing is, where on a non-gui administered system you may have one file that configures a specific function, the gui based apps tend to utilize several files that are intertwined. I'm certain there are pros and cons to this approach that I'm not aware of, but it does make console admin'ing a bit more challenging. At least for me anyway.
Maybe there should be a seperate "Glorified Typewriter" edition of Linux, so the rest of us don't have to be bothered.
As I'm reading through the various posts on this topic I can't help but wonder why more folks such as yourself aren't using FreeBSD or perhaps Gentoo Linux. I've been using FreeBSD as my primary desktop OS for over a year now with KDE. No OS branding to be found anywhere. Every part of it is directly (aside from minor patches) from the KDE source. The same being true for Gnome if that's your preference.
Having tried previous version of Suse, Mandrake, and a much older version of RedHat (6.1) I've come to the personal conclusion that I can't deal with all the OS branding. Upgrading apps is FAR harder, and updating the actual desktop environment seems to break all kinds of vendor specific configure tools. Well, unless you go and purchase a new CD.
I'm presently upgrading a friend's laptop to KDE 3.0.3 also running on FreeBSD. No funky vendor specific apps to break, it's about as pure a version of KDE as you can get. It's compiling from source now, and I have no doubts that when it completes everything will be up and running as well as it was under 3.0.1.
The upgrade process...
Delete all of KDE pkg_delete -rf qt*
Install it from source portinstall kde3
And that's it! As I understand it, Gentoo has a very similar type of package management.
The point is, there are plenty of solutions for those not wanting any vendor mucking around with their desktop experience. For the "blinking 12:00 on the VCR" crowd RedHat is trying to tweak things in for them. It's a different market, and one probably closer to where Microsoft's core market sits these days.
...is if Slashdot were looked back upon as one of the earliest mentions of the Y10k problem. None of those stupid programmers took into account 5 digits!!
Oh well, I'm looking forward to dealing with 2038 myself. What is it? About mid Janurary when it dies?
Three differnet Linux distros I tried to get to liking. Each and every time, "portinstall" on FreeBSD keeps me going back to it.
I really am glad to see Gentoo starting to implement a similar system. Having that ports tree enables me to keep my system up to date, without lingering dependencies, and without having to go racing out to buy the latest CD.
Personally, I think the distros like the fact that RPM is such a piece of crap as it ensures that buying a new CD is FAR easier than just upgrading what you have from the Net.
Unified, and without any documentation within that interface as to what any of those settings actually mean. Can't remark things out for testing. Best of all, and this really is the kicker... no GUI, no fixie!
Here in FreeBSD land, the kernel itself could have gone bad, and you can STILL get in and tweak on the configuration. One really good IRQ conflict in Windows and there's no tweaking on anything.
I got up to the point where the OpenOffice build was supposed to begin. There it just stops. No errors, or any of the usual kind of things if a port doesn't play. Suppose I need to get a post up on the ports mailing list.
Also, keep an eye out for a couple of kernel config options the port gets to asking for. I kept missing this as it was scrolling off the screen after I left the room.
# Some tweaks to get OpenOffice to build options MAXDSIZ="(1024*1024*1024)" options MAXSSIZ="(256*1024*1024)"
I'm not having much luck with this bugger so far, and most likely won't try again until much later into the evening tonight. Anyone else getting a proper build to happen?
Hope ya got a fat pipe. The source file on that thing is BIG! Something like 116 Meg. Thought I was on the way to getting this thing built, only to find out I had to manually download the latest Java SDK from Sun. Had to agree to something nasty on their site, as well as give them enough information to physically drown 3 humans in marketing brochures.
If you haven't already, go get that Java port taken care of before starting up the build on OpenOffice. Hopefully that'll help out those build it over night kinda folks.
According to the port message, have 6G available to run this build. I'm predicting a 6-7 hour build time, but I guess we'll see. On your mark, get set, who needs spell check anyways?
It also describes various reasons the ports system sucks, though "hard to use" isn't on my list. My major complaint with it is that the "base system" isn't packaged. With a RedHat system it is, and you can really take advantage of this. For example, when doing a security audit, boot from external media, check the GPG signatures in the package database, do a "rpm -Va", and make sure nothing extra is in suspicous places. ("rpm -qal" to get a list of what should be there, a "find" command to get what actually is.)
Okay, exactly what BSD have you used? The initial install of FreeBSD is ALL packages. If you never go about upgrading from what is released, you never even have to install the ports tree!
Don't have a package? Make one! Every port can be built into a package to distribute to other machines in a binary form.
As to doing a security audit, there's probably many better ways to do it, but the first thing that comes to mind are the portupgrade utilities, which comes with a pkgdb script. This runs through what is in the ports tree, what things depend on, and compares to what is actually installed.
Lastly, to address your issue with the "base system" not being packaged, that too is dead wrong. There are regular binary package snapshots created of the STABLE tree. It's just one heck of a lot easier, and more up to date, to cvsup the latest tree and compile.
You then know no binaries have been tampered with. With a BSD system, you pretty need to reinstall.
This is either FUD or ignorance. If you're dead serious about knowing whether or not files have been tampered with you wouldn't even consider RPM as your first line of defense. You'd be scripting your own MD5 summaries, or running something like TripWire.
Oh sure, the ports system may be easy and all. Thing is, I have found a whole new level of respect for the Linux world of RPM's here. Normally a FreeBSD user, I went and slapped Suse 7.3 on a friend's laptop machine.
Suse's install is very sweet. Worked just like all those generic reviews out there said it would. Oh GOD, then I got the stupid notion in my head that I'd go in and update software! Nothing could have made me regret not going with FreeBSD more.
First off, pulled down the Mozilla RPM from Suse's site. Oh sure, it installs and all. After that, Mozilla comes up with a lovely blank screen!
The real beauty was trying to upgrade Gnome from Suse's RPM's. Can't install gnome-control without xscreensaver, which won't install without a couple of packages I've never heard of. Apparently gnome-core needs Sawfish installed... and of course Sawfish needs gnome-core. Weee!
I'm quite certain there's some kind of funky command line switch I'm going to need to extract from the overly verbose RPM man page. On FreeBSD I never have to deal with this crap. Every port and package has pretty much worked out all the dependency issues for me. Especially critical for something like Gnome which has dependencies that read like a Mormon's family tree (no, that is not a slam on Mormons. Geeesh).
Tell ya what though, for those folks who have been able to make use of RPM on a regular basis I have a new found respect. Anyone who can manage to get through "libobscure.so.12 not found" and still keep a system running is far smarter about this stuff than I am. This dumb FreeBSD user is humbled.
Oh boy, many apologies are owed to the Post from me here. Wow, I had no idea what a wacko this lady is.
On April 16, the President announced a new initiative that will bring together the Federal Government and industry in a voluntary program to provide secure communications while meeting the legitimate needs of law enforcement. At the heart of the plan is a new tamper-proof encryption chip called the "Clipper Chip" together with a split-key approach to escrowing keys. Two escrow agencies are used, and the key parts from both are needed to reconstruct a key. -- Dorothy Danning
Wow. Calling the clipper chip voluntary. Either a total idiot, or truly evil at her core. Microsoft needs more folks like her speaking up on their behalf:)
This is like Disinformation 101 here. How to out and out lie, without saying anything untrue. Especially handy to be able to spot fun things like this when reading politically involved stories.
"I've never seen a systematic study that showed open source to be more secure," said Dorothy Denning, a professor of computer science at Georgetown University who specializes in information warfare.
Okay, I haven't seen any such report like Ms. Denning has described either. I also haven't seen any report meeting her criteria saying that Microsoft makes more secure software. Note the clever bit here.
The totally truthful thing to say is that she hadn't read any studies supporting either argument. For all we know, the spin was from the Post (who is definitely NOT above doing so) by only printing a single sentence of a larger idea Ms. Denning was trying to get across.
Free software is their competition. Next thing you know people like Alan Cox might speak to them about the benifits of open source. My god, how evil!
If Lockheed and Boeing were in the midst of competing for a contract, one would not be suggesting the other be BANNED through legislation. Sure, the competition would be rough. Thing is, they would be competing on the merits of the product they were bidding on.
What is happening here is (to keep the metaphor a rolling) is Boeing is making the claim that Lockheed is making inferior products, and giving all the secrets to unfriendly nations. That to even consider doing business with Lockheed is equivalent to being an unAmerican communist. You're not for communism are you?
Despite what you make think, it is not a usual occurance to have one competitor try to get legislation passed to ban another. You require a special kind of arrogance to go that far.
Maybe the answer is to break FreeBSD into a 'development' team and a 'packaging' team
There is a seperation of a sort concerning this already. FreeBSD has a Release Engineering Team that handles just this kinda stuff.
Consider Linux as an example.
Although both FreeBSD and Linux share many similar philosophies and practices, you really can't compare the two in this kind of discussion. If Debian and Linux were the same thing, then you would have something to compare. This seems to get lost on folks who spend a lot of time working with Linux. The kernel, userland, packaging, pretty much the whole enchilada falls under the same project. This has a lot of positive benefits to us end user types. As we are starting to see, this also brings a lot of cooks into the same kitchen.
The 'single integrated distribution' approach of FreeBSD may produce better quality software (so the BSDers claim), but maybe it doesn't scale so well to large numbers of developers and 'town councils'.
From looking in at this from way out here on the edges I think you may be approaching the problem with the political setup. FreeBSD seems to have set up a republic of sorts without a president. Could you imagine what the US government would be like if only the congress were involved with making laws? No president, no supreme court. The entire system would be brought to a screeching halt, bogged down in committe. That, or whomever was enjoying the majority for the moment would be distorting all the laws one way or the other. It's just not a pretty picture.
Before FreeBSD should be looking at any kind of delegating any of the sub-projects, there needs to be a hard look given to the over all political structure. There's just too many folks to keep things to purely a commitee kind of thing, but not enough for a governmental style complexity. Somewhere in the middle is where things need to be. Now to see if the core team has the courage and forethought to head down that road.
A few years ago (actually more than that) on Windows 3.1, Microsoft came out with a voice recognition app. The basic notion of this thing was to allow your voice to control the basic environment. Some of it even kinda worked.
This eventually got kind of annoying, and I pulled it off that system. I don't regret for a second playing with it. It taught me some valuable lessons about the arena of voice recognition.
1. I don't want to talk to my computer. You'd have to try this for a while to see for yourself, but the process is exhausting compared to just typing and clicking on stuff.
2. I never realized how much people tend to slur words used in context, but pronounce them properly by themselves. In the training session where this app learns your voice, I found that I say "Open File" differently when reading it than when I'm just saying it aloud.
3. Context is critical. For a person to determine the true meaning of words there's all kinds of voice inflection, and body language that needs to be read. I'm not sure I'd want to see a computer that smart!
Personally, I don't see a huge problem with the whole desktop metaphor interacting with a keyboard anyway. It may have a lot to do with those folks that honestly don't wish to use a computer, they just want a machine to think for them. I would think anyone who does tech support might appreciate what I mean here.
Bottom line, the only audio I want my computer to ever deal with is music playing in the background.
Re:All great Sci-Fi ideas come to pass eventually
on
Why Hal Will Never Exist
·
· Score: 3, Funny
If brightly coloured spandex clothes ever become commonplace I'm quitting this planet...
Man, you totally missed out on the 80's didn't you?
Have you considered the very real possibility that the problem isn't the import filters, but some corrupted doc files? Especially earlier versions of Word did not much care for "open > edit > save > open > edit > save > rinse > repeat". Repetitive edits of the same document tend to start mucking things up.
You might try copy and pasting your files clean. If offending document can open, copy everything outta there and paste into a new doc.
I know it sounds like a cheap hack, but I have seen this work. With that fresh, and free of extra cruft, document you might want to try some of those import filters again. They may still not work fully, but at least they've been given a fair test.
...you shouldn't be relying on grammar checkers for simple stuff like subject-verb agreement and active/passive voice.
I've got a friend that I webmaster a news site for. He gets all kinds of mail, press releases, editorials, and such coming at him. He's pretty good with grammar, but trying to proof that much information just isn't reasonable for that amount of content.
For this reason, more than almost any other, I have not fully endorsed the notion that he should run any kind of *nix. It would simply cost him way too much time and effort for this one feature available in Word.
The only point I'm trying to make here is that there are other uses for grammar utilities than just having a person check their own work. I would imagine many other folks also run sanity checks on written material through Word prior to publishing.
...blindly make a change suggested by Word because they assumed that Word was infallible.
Too sadly true. Thing is, grammar checking in bulk is probably more of a time consuming task for a human than spell checking. Grammatical errors tend to be far more subtle, and many times invisible until the sentence is spoken aloud.
I couldn't tell if previewish was an actual word so I did a search on google for it.
Now that this word has been mentioned all of 3 times now in this thread, it is now an official Internet term! Don't believe me? Follow that Google link once more. Now has 2 valid hits.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed, if we do experience a short "ice age" then many people will think globabl warming was a bunch of hogwash and say it is ok to pollute
A couple of years ago I did one of those phone polls some organization was running. The poll appeared to be structured in such a way as to run through a different set of questions based on how you answered earlier ones.
I got asked if I believed that humans were causing global warming. I said no.
The follow up questions all involved how little I cared about pollution, with possible answers that didn't approach how I felt about polution in general. The thinking was that if I didn't stay awake at night worrying about global warming that I was okay with existing, or even worse, levels of pollution.
You don't need to worry about global warming to be just as concerned with making air not fit for breathing, or water not fit for drinking. Hell, I've seen first hand what some cleaning up can do right here in Los Angeles. Having lived here my entire life, I remember just how bad the air was when I was a kid as opposed to what it's like today. I distinctly remember "smog alerts" and what the sky around here used to look like.
The world doesn't have to be coming to an end to have pollution way up there in the things to be concerned about category.
This article is simply scarist propaganda. While the underlying research may be valid (the salinity of the artic might be incresing) I think its a bit much to suddenly assume that this is caused by humans.
Although I find myself in agreement with much of what you had to say here, I believe this statement is a bit harsh. The author's call to action was not to drastically alter human behavior, or change how we make our vehicles move. He was calling attention to the issue of oceanic salinity, and the need to get many more measurement points so that we can understand just what in the heck is going on.
I've read enough of the enviromentalist wacko articles to know the difference. This guy doesn't strike me as yet another disaffected communist as is commonly spouting the end of the world is near. You'll find enough of those types posting on this thread as it is! A call to get more data sounds like someone who knows a bit more about the topic than some pamphlet reading zealot.
And what effect does dumping iron in the ocean have on that biosphere, and by extension, the climate? Killing off the Great Barrier Reef doesn't seem like the answer.
.
Your first bit is an outstanding question. The second is jumping WAY too fast to a conclusion. For a more detailed analysis of what all is being talked about here, please refer to the Wired article Dumping Iron by Charles Graeber
More interestingly are the counter viewpoints to the approach be described in this article. First off, the folks who don't think this will do anything but burn dollars. The second group of those critical are concerned with the notion that we're not 100% certain that the globe is warming, or if it is, by how much.
What if we took corrective action to cool things off, only to find that it wasn't as bad as was thought. The cure would definitely be worse than the symptoms.
I do find myself in agreement with Dr. Gagosian's main point from the original article. We need a LOT more data, and a much more complete understanding of exactly what is going on before we seriouly consider corrective actions.
If you happen to be on some flavor of *nix, you might want to consider using Fluxbox as your window manager. It lets you connect windows for anything, in much the same way Photoshop does.
I start fourth year of a degree course in computer science in just over a week, and I'm scared of Telnet.
I cannot begin to tell you how pleased I am to hear this about my future competition in the job market. What kind of wine do your professors like? I feel like I owe them something!
From my experience in the *nix world, everything done GUI-ily can be done..not...gui-ly
That's what I was thinking, coming from FreeBSD, until I got a hard look at the back end of Suse's config files. This is not a slam on Suse!! They have darn good reasons for some of the complexity that goes into their configs as it relates to the quite popular Yast2 app. The thing is, that complexity becomes really clever to figure out when just looking at the end result of the fancier tools. Had similar problems with Mandrake as well. Not really experienced enough with RedHat to say.
Thing is, where on a non-gui administered system you may have one file that configures a specific function, the gui based apps tend to utilize several files that are intertwined. I'm certain there are pros and cons to this approach that I'm not aware of, but it does make console admin'ing a bit more challenging. At least for me anyway.
Maybe there should be a seperate "Glorified Typewriter" edition of Linux, so the rest of us don't have to be bothered.
As I'm reading through the various posts on this topic I can't help but wonder why more folks such as yourself aren't using FreeBSD or perhaps Gentoo Linux. I've been using FreeBSD as my primary desktop OS for over a year now with KDE. No OS branding to be found anywhere. Every part of it is directly (aside from minor patches) from the KDE source. The same being true for Gnome if that's your preference.
Having tried previous version of Suse, Mandrake, and a much older version of RedHat (6.1) I've come to the personal conclusion that I can't deal with all the OS branding. Upgrading apps is FAR harder, and updating the actual desktop environment seems to break all kinds of vendor specific configure tools. Well, unless you go and purchase a new CD.
I'm presently upgrading a friend's laptop to KDE 3.0.3 also running on FreeBSD. No funky vendor specific apps to break, it's about as pure a version of KDE as you can get. It's compiling from source now, and I have no doubts that when it completes everything will be up and running as well as it was under 3.0.1.
The upgrade process...
Delete all of KDE
pkg_delete -rf qt*
Install it from source
portinstall kde3
And that's it! As I understand it, Gentoo has a very similar type of package management.
The point is, there are plenty of solutions for those not wanting any vendor mucking around with their desktop experience. For the "blinking 12:00 on the VCR" crowd RedHat is trying to tweak things in for them. It's a different market, and one probably closer to where Microsoft's core market sits these days.
...is if Slashdot were looked back upon as one of the earliest mentions of the Y10k problem. None of those stupid programmers took into account 5 digits!!
Oh well, I'm looking forward to dealing with 2038 myself. What is it? About mid Janurary when it dies?
Three differnet Linux distros I tried to get to liking. Each and every time, "portinstall" on FreeBSD keeps me going back to it.
I really am glad to see Gentoo starting to implement a similar system. Having that ports tree enables me to keep my system up to date, without lingering dependencies, and without having to go racing out to buy the latest CD.
Personally, I think the distros like the fact that RPM is such a piece of crap as it ensures that buying a new CD is FAR easier than just upgrading what you have from the Net.
Registry gives a unified interface.
Unified, and without any documentation within that interface as to what any of those settings actually mean. Can't remark things out for testing. Best of all, and this really is the kicker... no GUI, no fixie!
Here in FreeBSD land, the kernel itself could have gone bad, and you can STILL get in and tweak on the configuration. One really good IRQ conflict in Windows and there's no tweaking on anything.
Use what you want. Don't submit to any Slashdot propaganda which tells you that you need to run a free operating system to be cool.
Would you like an after dinner coffee with your FUD Mr. Gates?
I got up to the point where the OpenOffice build was supposed to begin. There it just stops. No errors, or any of the usual kind of things if a port doesn't play. Suppose I need to get a post up on the ports mailing list.
Also, keep an eye out for a couple of kernel config options the port gets to asking for. I kept missing this as it was scrolling off the screen after I left the room.
# Some tweaks to get OpenOffice to build
options MAXDSIZ="(1024*1024*1024)"
options MAXSSIZ="(256*1024*1024)"
I'm not having much luck with this bugger so far, and most likely won't try again until much later into the evening tonight. Anyone else getting a proper build to happen?
Hope ya got a fat pipe. The source file on that thing is BIG! Something like 116 Meg. Thought I was on the way to getting this thing built, only to find out I had to manually download the latest Java SDK from Sun. Had to agree to something nasty on their site, as well as give them enough information to physically drown 3 humans in marketing brochures.
If you haven't already, go get that Java port taken care of before starting up the build on OpenOffice. Hopefully that'll help out those build it over night kinda folks.
According to the port message, have 6G available to run this build. I'm predicting a 6-7 hour build time, but I guess we'll see. On your mark, get set, who needs spell check anyways?
It also describes various reasons the ports system sucks, though "hard to use" isn't on my list. My major complaint with it is that the "base system" isn't packaged. With a RedHat system it is, and you can really take advantage of this. For example, when doing a security audit, boot from external media, check the GPG signatures in the package database, do a "rpm -Va", and make sure nothing extra is in suspicous places. ("rpm -qal" to get a list of what should be there, a "find" command to get what actually is.)
Okay, exactly what BSD have you used? The initial install of FreeBSD is ALL packages. If you never go about upgrading from what is released, you never even have to install the ports tree!
Don't have a package? Make one! Every port can be built into a package to distribute to other machines in a binary form.
As to doing a security audit, there's probably many better ways to do it, but the first thing that comes to mind are the portupgrade utilities, which comes with a pkgdb script. This runs through what is in the ports tree, what things depend on, and compares to what is actually installed.
Lastly, to address your issue with the "base system" not being packaged, that too is dead wrong. There are regular binary package snapshots created of the STABLE tree. It's just one heck of a lot easier, and more up to date, to cvsup the latest tree and compile.
You then know no binaries have been tampered with. With a BSD system, you pretty need to reinstall.
This is either FUD or ignorance. If you're dead serious about knowing whether or not files have been tampered with you wouldn't even consider RPM as your first line of defense. You'd be scripting your own MD5 summaries, or running something like TripWire.
Oh sure, the ports system may be easy and all. Thing is, I have found a whole new level of respect for the Linux world of RPM's here. Normally a FreeBSD user, I went and slapped Suse 7.3 on a friend's laptop machine.
Suse's install is very sweet. Worked just like all those generic reviews out there said it would. Oh GOD, then I got the stupid notion in my head that I'd go in and update software! Nothing could have made me regret not going with FreeBSD more.
First off, pulled down the Mozilla RPM from Suse's site. Oh sure, it installs and all. After that, Mozilla comes up with a lovely blank screen!
The real beauty was trying to upgrade Gnome from Suse's RPM's. Can't install gnome-control without xscreensaver, which won't install without a couple of packages I've never heard of. Apparently gnome-core needs Sawfish installed... and of course Sawfish needs gnome-core. Weee!
I'm quite certain there's some kind of funky command line switch I'm going to need to extract from the overly verbose RPM man page. On FreeBSD I never have to deal with this crap. Every port and package has pretty much worked out all the dependency issues for me. Especially critical for something like Gnome which has dependencies that read like a Mormon's family tree (no, that is not a slam on Mormons. Geeesh).
Tell ya what though, for those folks who have been able to make use of RPM on a regular basis I have a new found respect. Anyone who can manage to get through "libobscure.so.12 not found" and still keep a system running is far smarter about this stuff than I am. This dumb FreeBSD user is humbled.
Oh boy, many apologies are owed to the Post from me here. Wow, I had no idea what a wacko this lady is.
:)
On April 16, the President announced a new initiative that will bring together the Federal Government and industry in a voluntary program to provide secure communications while meeting the legitimate needs of law enforcement. At the heart of the plan is a new tamper-proof encryption chip called the "Clipper Chip" together with a split-key approach to escrowing keys. Two escrow agencies are used, and the key parts from both are needed to reconstruct a key.
-- Dorothy Danning
Wow. Calling the clipper chip voluntary. Either a total idiot, or truly evil at her core. Microsoft needs more folks like her speaking up on their behalf
Okay, I haven't seen any such report like Ms. Denning has described either. I also haven't seen any report meeting her criteria saying that Microsoft makes more secure software. Note the clever bit here.
The totally truthful thing to say is that she hadn't read any studies supporting either argument. For all we know, the spin was from the Post (who is definitely NOT above doing so) by only printing a single sentence of a larger idea Ms. Denning was trying to get across.
Free software is their competition. Next thing you know people like Alan Cox might speak to them about the benifits of open source. My god, how evil!
If Lockheed and Boeing were in the midst of competing for a contract, one would not be suggesting the other be BANNED through legislation. Sure, the competition would be rough. Thing is, they would be competing on the merits of the product they were bidding on.
What is happening here is (to keep the metaphor a rolling) is Boeing is making the claim that Lockheed is making inferior products, and giving all the secrets to unfriendly nations. That to even consider doing business with Lockheed is equivalent to being an unAmerican communist. You're not for communism are you?
Despite what you make think, it is not a usual occurance to have one competitor try to get legislation passed to ban another. You require a special kind of arrogance to go that far.
Maybe the answer is to break FreeBSD into a 'development' team and a 'packaging' team
There is a seperation of a sort concerning this already. FreeBSD has a Release Engineering Team that handles just this kinda stuff.
Consider Linux as an example.
Although both FreeBSD and Linux share many similar philosophies and practices, you really can't compare the two in this kind of discussion. If Debian and Linux were the same thing, then you would have something to compare. This seems to get lost on folks who spend a lot of time working with Linux. The kernel, userland, packaging, pretty much the whole enchilada falls under the same project. This has a lot of positive benefits to us end user types. As we are starting to see, this also brings a lot of cooks into the same kitchen.
The 'single integrated distribution' approach of FreeBSD may produce better quality software (so the BSDers claim), but maybe it doesn't scale so well to large numbers of developers and 'town councils'.
From looking in at this from way out here on the edges I think you may be approaching the problem with the political setup. FreeBSD seems to have set up a republic of sorts without a president. Could you imagine what the US government would be like if only the congress were involved with making laws? No president, no supreme court. The entire system would be brought to a screeching halt, bogged down in committe. That, or whomever was enjoying the majority for the moment would be distorting all the laws one way or the other. It's just not a pretty picture.
Before FreeBSD should be looking at any kind of delegating any of the sub-projects, there needs to be a hard look given to the over all political structure. There's just too many folks to keep things to purely a commitee kind of thing, but not enough for a governmental style complexity. Somewhere in the middle is where things need to be. Now to see if the core team has the courage and forethought to head down that road.
A few years ago (actually more than that) on Windows 3.1, Microsoft came out with a voice recognition app. The basic notion of this thing was to allow your voice to control the basic environment. Some of it even kinda worked.
This eventually got kind of annoying, and I pulled it off that system. I don't regret for a second playing with it. It taught me some valuable lessons about the arena of voice recognition.
1. I don't want to talk to my computer. You'd have to try this for a while to see for yourself, but the process is exhausting compared to just typing and clicking on stuff.
2. I never realized how much people tend to slur words used in context, but pronounce them properly by themselves. In the training session where this app learns your voice, I found that I say "Open File" differently when reading it than when I'm just saying it aloud.
3. Context is critical. For a person to determine the true meaning of words there's all kinds of voice inflection, and body language that needs to be read. I'm not sure I'd want to see a computer that smart!
Personally, I don't see a huge problem with the whole desktop metaphor interacting with a keyboard anyway. It may have a lot to do with those folks that honestly don't wish to use a computer, they just want a machine to think for them. I would think anyone who does tech support might appreciate what I mean here.
Bottom line, the only audio I want my computer to ever deal with is music playing in the background.
If brightly coloured spandex clothes ever become commonplace I'm quitting this planet...
Man, you totally missed out on the 80's didn't you?
Even Word sometimes chokes and dies on them.
Have you considered the very real possibility that the problem isn't the import filters, but some corrupted doc files? Especially earlier versions of Word did not much care for "open > edit > save > open > edit > save > rinse > repeat". Repetitive edits of the same document tend to start mucking things up.
You might try copy and pasting your files clean. If offending document can open, copy everything outta there and paste into a new doc.
I know it sounds like a cheap hack, but I have seen this work. With that fresh, and free of extra cruft, document you might want to try some of those import filters again. They may still not work fully, but at least they've been given a fair test.
...you shouldn't be relying on grammar checkers for simple stuff like subject-verb agreement and active/passive voice.
...blindly make a change suggested by Word because they assumed that Word was infallible.
I've got a friend that I webmaster a news site for. He gets all kinds of mail, press releases, editorials, and such coming at him. He's pretty good with grammar, but trying to proof that much information just isn't reasonable for that amount of content.
For this reason, more than almost any other, I have not fully endorsed the notion that he should run any kind of *nix. It would simply cost him way too much time and effort for this one feature available in Word.
The only point I'm trying to make here is that there are other uses for grammar utilities than just having a person check their own work. I would imagine many other folks also run sanity checks on written material through Word prior to publishing.
Too sadly true. Thing is, grammar checking in bulk is probably more of a time consuming task for a human than spell checking. Grammatical errors tend to be far more subtle, and many times invisible until the sentence is spoken aloud.
1. Reboot.
2. Re-install.
Amateur. Anyone who has ever had to troubleshoot a Windows box knows that you need at least 3 reboots before reinstalling. Geeesh!
I couldn't tell if previewish was an actual word so I did a search on google for it.
Now that this word has been mentioned all of 3 times now in this thread, it is now an official Internet term! Don't believe me? Follow that Google link once more. Now has 2 valid hits.